In my previous post, I discussed my issues with Four Weddings and a Funeral. Because I was in the mood for that sort of thing and curious about some patterns I was noticing, I rewatched Notting Hill, by the same screenwriter and with the same leading man. In case you’re not familiar with all the late 90s romantic comedies, that’s the one in which Hugh Grant plays a bookstore owner whose life gets turned upside down when Hollywood’s hottest star (Julia Roberts) comes into his bookstore.

I don’t remember whether or not I saw this one at the theater. I have no specific memory of the event of seeing it in a theater, though it’s the sort of thing I would have gone to a theater to see. The time I do remember seeing it was on an airplane. I was on a business trip to Washington, D.C. (a trip full of stories that I won’t get into here), and as soon as the plane for the return trip pushed away from the gate at the airport, the FAA shut down everything because of bad storms, so we sat on the tarmac to wait out the storm. They passed out food and headsets and started showing movies. This was before you got to choose from an entertainment menu. You watched what they showed you, and this was the first movie up.

For the most part, it corrects a lot of the issues with Four Weddings (which is why it’s so odd that the writer went right back to shallow and superficial in Love Actually a few years later). You can actually see why these people might like each other beyond physical attraction. Just the fact that she comes to shop in his niche specialty bookstore is a good sign that they have something in common. He makes her laugh, and they share a similar sense of humor. She meets his wacky friends (who actually do seem like real friends) and enjoys getting to feel like a normal person rather than a celebrity when she’s with him and his friends. They have long conversations about their pasts and about how they see the world. The main conflict giving them trouble is her celebrity. She can’t do anything without it getting plastered all over the tabloids, so she’s guarded and a little paranoid. One thing she enjoys about him is that he makes her feel normal, so she doesn’t want to bring him into the celebrity part of her life, but that also means she shuts him out of a huge chunk of her life, which makes him feel like he doesn’t matter to her.

All that’s great. It’s got room for romantic drama and comedy. But it falls flat for me in the way it’s resolved. Spoilers ahead, since you can’t talk about the ending without giving away the ending.

To sum it up briefly, though the whole movie, Hugh Grant’s character, William, has had to jump through hoops to be with Julia Roberts’s character, Anna. He has to use a code word to get put through to her when he calls her hotel, and when he shows up at her invitation, he gets stuck in the press junket and having to pretend to be a reporter interviewing her just to talk to her — and then has to go on and interview everyone else involved in the movie. After they’ve gone on a few dates, they come back to her hotel to find the movie star boyfriend he didn’t know she had, and he has to pretend to be a room service waiter and clear dirty dishes to cover for her. She vanishes for a while before suddenly showing up at his place when she needs refuge from a media hellstorm, but then after they spend a wonderful day and night together, really connecting, she finds the media camped out in front of his house, blames him and storms off, and has no contact with him for months. He finds out she’s shooting a movie in London, shows up on set, and she invites him to stick around and watch, but he hears her describing him as “nobody” to a castmate and leaves. On her last day in town, she shows up at his shop and gives the “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” speech that became somewhat iconic, but he says he can’t just go on with the rollercoaster of not knowing what’s going on with her and turns her down — and then he’s the one who realizes the error of his ways, does the Rom Com Run to rush to her press event before she leaves town, has to pose as a reporter again, and has to do the public apology and declaration of his feelings before they get their happy ending.

And that last part is what has me going “Seriously?” I might even have said that out loud on the airplane when I saw it (fortunately, everyone else, including my boss sitting a couple of rows ahead of me, had on headsets and the rain was hitting the plane really hard, so no one heard me).

I think I’ve finally figured out why that seemed so wrong to me, and it comes back to a concept I got from a college course on interpersonal communication and relationships that’s also key to romance writing: the balance of relationship power. Basically, the person who can most easily walk away from a relationship is the person who has the power in the relationship. That can include things like money and home, status within the community, perceived attractiveness/ability to find another partner, or caring. The person who will be less brokenhearted if the relationship ends has some power over the person who will be hurt more, as does the person whose status and security won’t be harmed. A relationship that’s not balanced seems wrong to us as an audience. When you’re in a relationship like that, it’s uncomfortable. At worst, a big power imbalance can lead to abuse — the person with power may feel free to abuse the person with less power, or a person who feels like they have less power may abuse or gaslight the other person as a way of gaining more power.

This dynamic is the main reason behind the Rom Com Run, when one of the characters runs through the streets/airport/train station and then makes the big public declaration of love and commitment. Usually, that’s the person who’s at least pretended to care less than the other person, but then that person realizes that trying to hold on to power by acting like they don’t care is going to make them lose someone they do care about, so they give up their power by making the grand gesture that shows how much they care. That’s the sort of ending we needed for Four Weddings, to show that the commitmentphobe is willing to publicly commit, but it needed to go with a better relationship and a person who deserved the commitment.

In this movie, Anna has all the power throughout. She’s incredibly wealthy and popular and could have any man she wants. She has all the agency. He can’t even contact her to communicate with her unless she gives him the code word for the hotel, so all their communication and interaction is on her terms. He’s the one who has to make huge efforts to see her, like having to pretend to be a journalist just to set a date. The power needs to be rebalanced, and yet he’s the one giving up even more power by being the one to do the Rom Com Run and make the grand gesture. She does give up some power when she shows up at his shop and asks him to love her, but when he rejects her, it’s not because he doesn’t care. It’s because he does care so much that he can’t risk letting her hurt him again. This is when she needs to show how she cares. She needs to go through some of what he’s gone through. She’s been trying to hide him and deny him in order to protect herself, but she needs to show him she’s willing to risk being hurt for his sake.

I’ve been trying to figure out a mental rewrite. It would be weird if she did some big chase through the streets after he turned her down, but maybe she could say something in an interview about how she ruined her best relationship and hurt someone she cared about by trying to protect herself without thinking about how it would make him feel. Or she could have made that “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy” speech in public after she’d done something to chase him down.

I think what the writer was going for was that William was in the wrong for turning her down because he was trying to protect himself, and therefore he had to apologize to her, but he’d been quite open to her up to that point. He only shut her down after she’d ditched him several times. Hmm, come to think of it, to get all Biblical about it, she denied him three times, so she should have had to affirm him three times. Or, to get more cynical about it, the writer figured that women would be the core audience, so the man always has to be wrong and the one to apologize, that the female audience wouldn’t want the woman to be the one to have to make the effort. I did have romance writer friends who took that view on this movie, so maybe it would have been a flop if they’d made an ending I’d like.

Still, it’s lacking in symmetry. The Rom Com Run is usually effective because it’s the person who would never do such a thing who has to drop all their barriers and pretenses to do it. It’s less effective if that person has spent the whole movie having to do that sort of thing. He’s already had to pretend to be a journalist for Horse and Hound in order to talk to her, so there’s no big moment of surprise or shock when he does it again at the end. We know he can/will do it because he has.

I do enjoy much of this movie. I love the relationship among the friends. I like the press junket bit, though it does frustrate me that she could have just told her staff who he was and got him out of it once he’d talked to her. I even like the interaction between the two main characters and much of their relationship. I can imagine that they would be happy together. I just need to fast-forward past the Rom Com Run and get to the ending montage.

Next up, I revisit a romcom that gets most things right. It’s almost a response to the kind of relationships shown in Four Weddings.

I noticed that Four Weddings and a Funeral was leaving Prime at the end of last month and decided to watch it, since I hadn’t seen it in forever, and that led to me rewatching Notting Hill, and both of these movies made me think about how important it is to stick the landing and have a satisfying ending to a story. I enjoy both of these movies, but then the endings fall flat for me and leave me with an unfavorable impression of the whole movie. Since I have a lot more experience as a writer than I had the last time I saw these films, I thought I’d dig into why these endings don’t work for me. In order to discuss the ending, I have to give away the ending, so spoilers.

Four Weddings came out at just the right time for me, when I was in a phase in which most of my social life revolved around wedding-related events. It seemed like every other weekend I was either at a wedding, at a bridal shower, or at an engagement party (a couple of times I was actually at an engagement, as the guy set it up to have all the friends around as a big surprise). A movie about running into people at weddings pretty much reflected my life (though these mostly weren’t big, fancy weddings, and I never got to wear a stunning hat). And then we hit the ending, and I left the theater going, “What?” I think a lot of that was because I was writing category romances at the time, and it was a pretty clear rule that if a character was a commitmentphobe in the beginning of the story, he had to make a big, public commitment at the end. The Notting Hill ending would be more apt for this movie (and more on that in the next post, since just dealing with Four Weddings requires a long post). Having the couple just agree not to marry each other but still be in a relationship made things just sort of fizzle out. I also wasn’t crazy about Charles ending up with Carrie after she essentially strung him along through the whole movie. The more usual romance would have had him learning the error of his ways from seeing the way Carrie acted and then finding real love with someone else, like maybe the friend who’d been in love with him all along. But as it was, no one learned anything. There was no sense of anyone growing, no character arc, and a romcom without a character arc is just a story with funny lines and some kissing.

But I think there’s more to the issues I have with the ending, and watching the Cinema Therapy guys’ take on Love Actually just before Christmas helped me realize it, since there are threads in Love Actually that show up in this movie, too. Mostly, both of these films have a pretty shallow take on love. It’s all about the thunderbolt at first meeting, not about getting to know each other and developing anything deeper. It’s even a plot point that most of these people haven’t actually talked much to each other. They can’t possibly be in love, since they don’t actually know each other. Both films involve someone confessing their love to someone who’s in a committed relationship, though at least in this case the person isn’t married to their best friend. Here, he’s slept with her twice, but the only conversations we’ve seen between them are about how sexually forward she is. Both movies also involve someone who learns a new language to be able to communicate with someone they’re attracted to, though in this case it happens early in the movie and presumably they communicate with each other a bit before we see them getting married in the epilogue montage rather than them getting engaged in their first conversation in which they can understand each other. Still, she decides to learn sign language to communicate with him purely based on his looks, with no idea whatsoever of what kind of person he is (though I guess she needs the sign language to learn what kind of person he is).

Really, though, all the relationships are pretty shallow. I love the group of friends, but we don’t actually see much of them together acting like friends (I’d have preferred to follow the group to the castle rather than following Charles to chase after Carrie). They tell us the gay couple has a true, deeply committed relationship that’s essentially a marriage (in the time before that was legal), but we don’t see any of that beyond one domestic moment during the opening credits and the depth of emotion at the funeral. They tell us that Fiona has always been in love with Charles, but we never see her acting like she cares about him at all.

The more typical rom-com formula probably would have had Charles realizing that while he’s been looking for the thunderbolt to shock him out of his fear of commitment, someone who really loves him has been there all along and his fear has kept him from seeing her. I get the urge to upend the formula, to not have him realize that pining after Carrie has given him an excuse not to commit and not have him realize that his close friend was right for him all along, but if you’re going to upend a trope, what you come up with has to be better and more satisfying than the trope would have been, and two commitmentphobes choosing to not get married (but be together) was somewhat less than satisfying.

There was a lot said at the time this movie came out about Hugh Grant’s floppy-haired British charm, but his character is actually kind of a jerk in this movie when I rewatch it during Hugh Grant’s jerk/villain phase (I rewatched Honor Among Thieves last weekend). He’s shown sympathetically, but this is someone who can’t be bothered to be on time with the rings for a wedding where he’s the best man. He ditches his friends for a woman he’s just met. He ditches plans with his brother to chase after a woman. He mocks his ex-girlfriends to his current girlfriend, then mocks her to the next girlfriend. He sleeps with an engaged woman. He jilts a woman at the altar. This isn’t really a romantic hero.

I still enjoy the movie. I just wish it could take the ingredients of a brilliant cast and witty dialogue and do something better with them. As it is, it’s a really shallow view of love and relationships, and the shallow characters don’t really gain any depth or grow during the movie.

Richard Curtis does improve in Notting Hill, but he still doesn’t stick the landing. More on that next time.